An introduction to markup

1. Why mark up text?

In a file without markup, the running text will
normally be in plain text format. To take an extremely
simple example, imagine a text file that just contains

In
Wellington I saw a statue of Wellington

If we want to search this kind of text file for the string
Wellington we can easily find both of the examples by using
a find command. But there is no way to distinguish between the
person and the place.

Suppose that we want to find all references to the First Duke of
Wellington in a text (one that contains, rather than the eight
words above, a couple of million words). We don’t want references
to places called Wellington, or to the duke’s son, the Second
Duke of Wellington, or any other people called Wellington. But we
do want to find all of these references to the same man:

Marking up a text semantically is the most reliable way to be
able to return all of the information you want to get from your
search. People, places and dates are often the focus of
semantic markup, but anything can be marked up
– quotations, emotions, economic data or food – anything
that is of interest to the researcher. In this course we will
show you some ways of doing this.